British doctor believes there is a CURE for Alzheimer's disease

WHICH disease affects half a million people in the UK, has no known cure and a diagnosis-to-death average of seven years?

Dr Rick Livesey aims to tackle the disease that affects 500,000 people in the UK

That is the question neurologist Dr Rick Livesey asks his undergraduates each year.

No one, he says, ever gets it right. Most of the young medics guess that it is a form of cancer.

They never anticipate the sheer scale of the problem that Alzheimer’s disease poses in the West today.

As our ageing population grows, dementia is set to be one of the most pressing medical issues of this century.

Dr Livesey and his team at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge are working with Alzheimer’s Research UK, using state-of-the-art stem cell technology to develop a better understanding of how the disease starts and then progresses.

“Most people know someone close to them who has Alzheimer’s or a different form of dementia but we know very little about it,” says Dr Livesey, whose own father was killed by the disease in 2007.

“It is a huge problem and the projected societal costs are astronomical. We cannot ignore the issue.” It is thought there will be one million people with dementia in the UK by 2025, two-thirds of which will be Alzheimer’s.

Some 95 per cent of these sufferers have sporadic Alzheimer’s, where the cause is unknown, but a small number have the genetic form, known as “familial” Alzheimer’s.

This is directly caused by a rogue gene that can be tested for early, but cannot be cured. If one parent has the gene, the child has a 50 per cent chance of developing the disease.

Dr Livesey uses this predictability and takes skin cells from someone who will definitely develop the disease.

He reprogrammes them into stem cells, which can then be transformed into any type of cell in the body.

These are then used to create neurons from the part of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s, the cerebral cortex.

In essence, Dr Livesey makes a “mini brain” that scientists can use to observe the disease for its entire cycle.

It is a revolutionary technique that is set to transform research in the field. “There are hallmarks for Alzheimer’s and we know what to look for at the end of the disease,” Dr Livesey says.

“What we don’t know is how the disease starts. To develop a cure you have to understand how it progresses.

“The traditional workhorse for medical research is mice but the problem here is that no other animal on the planet can get Alzheimer’s. We can genetically modify a mouse to have something similar, but it won’t respond to drugs in the same way.

The proof that this is not good enough is that it hasn’t led to drugs yet. When our neurons are in the Petri dish they almost talk to one another, they communicate and fire off signals.

“Brains are very ordered, they’re very structured. It isn’t random. So what we’re trying to do is reconstruct the real circuits. Real, mini human brains.”

MARK KEHOE

Incubated stem cells with alzheimers

I like to think that in about 20 to 25 years we will look back at this as a horrible dark period before we solved the problem

Dr Rick Livesey

Dr Livesey’s innovation allows researchers to develop their understanding of an illness that has baffled doctors for decades. What makes the “mini brains” such successful tools is that the disease’s process is accelerated:

“We can replay the disease,” he says. “What would normally take 60 years happens in three to four months. “We use these models both to ask how the disease works and for drug discovery.

We take drugs that have been used in humans for years and take them one at a time and see if they affect the disease. So we don’t have to go through the first five or six years of just proving it is safe.

Hopefully this will speed up the whole process of drug testing.”

Of course, Dr Livesey has been focusing on the small number of familial Alzheimer’s patients, but what of the other 95 per cent of sufferers?

Can Dr Livesey’s findings help them? “Dealing with the genetic form of the disease is clearly a good thing but it would be great if that extended to the rest of the population too,” he says.

“In others though, the cause is random and unknown, which is difficult to study. This is where Alzheimer’s Research UK came in.”

Dr Livesey approached the charity to see if there was a way to replicate sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease in the lab, a process that is infinitely more difficult as you “can’t replicate 60 years of life, diet, lifestyle etc”.

Now he and his team have been given a grant of £2million over five years from the Alborada Trust to see if this is possible, and to use their findings in the development of new drugs.

“Basically, what we want to do is continue with our research into those who have the genetic form of Alzheimer’s, expand into sporadic Alzheimer’s and then compare them.

We can then use the results to experiment with drugs.” The research being conducted in a small lab in Cambridge could be the best chance we have against a devastating illness that affects millions of families worldwide.

Dr Simon Ridley, head of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, says the “pioneering approach... holds real potential for speeding up the delivery of much-needed new treatments”.

It is clear that increasing the understanding of this disease is key to discovering the cure and Dr Livesey wholeheartedly believes this is possible.

This is why he has dedicated his career to what others would see as an impossible task. “It is a privilege.

You don’t get out of bed in the morning and think ‘What is the point in going to work today?’,” he says.

“I absolutely believe there is a cure for Alzheimer’s and that is not just scientist’s optimism. Look at heart disease. When I was a kid in the 1970s it was a rite of passage for a middle-aged, middle-class man to have a heart attack.

Then we developed a better understanding of lifestyle and the biology behind heart attacks. “It is a matter of more researchers, more money.

It doesn’t guarantee a solution but boy does it improve your chances. “Biology is understandable and if you understand it then you can develop drugs.

“I like to think that in about 20 to 25 years we will look back at this as a horrible dark period before we solved the problem.”

Alzheimer’s Research UK is Britain’s leading dementia research charity specialising in finding preventions, causes, treatments and a cure for dementia. To find out more or make a donation go to alzheimersresearchuk.org